A friend of mine posted very concernedly today on Facebook something to the effect of, “What will you do if you can’t get into the polls next Tuesday? Do you have a plan to vote?” The upshot of which was, “Skip the line, get in by tomorrow and early vote.”
My friend is a liberal, of course, and is all fired up about making sure your (democrat) vote counts and you don’t just sit at home and go, “ah fuck it”, or get to the polling place and encounter a long line that might make you have to stand and wait for an hour or two, which you might not be able to do because $WORKBOSSKIDSLAZY$. And he and his wife have four small kids. And his polling place is not nearby and if he had to walk to it, he’d have to walk on a busy road, like, if his car broke down. (Seriously? Uber? Call a friend? Read a website that explains, among other things, how you can get a ride to the polls? Christ.)
I countered with, well, gee whiz, my parents and grandparents manged to vote at the polling place on Election Day long before we ever had early voting. I managed to vote at the polling place before we had early voting, although one year I did vote absentee because I expected to be out of town on Election Day — but in those days it required appearing downtown at the Election Board office and filling out the ballot there. I guess as I recall that event, I could have requested a mail-in ballot, but then as now, I don’t trust the mail.
My friend said bully for them, but he’s got four kids and he’s not going to take them for what might be a long wait.
I bit my tongue at that point before I said I guessed he’d never heard of a babysitter. Or maybe his wife staying home while he went to vote, and them him staying with the kids while she went to vote. (Obviously either one of them stays home all day with them, or they both work and have a day care arrangement, which is why I can’t really give much credence to his whining about having to have the kids tag along.)
But the more I thought about this, the more I thought about the real reason for requiring citizens to show up to cast a ballot in person back in the bad old days. The reason wasn’t because the election board said “vote here and at this date and time, or don’t vote”, but because voting is an exercise in community-building. You go to vote and you meet your neighbors, and maybe their kids who are tagging along, and you talk and make connections, and your knowledge of who lives around you and who is maybe a shady character who has no business hanging around increases markedly. You feel better about opening your door to strangers at Halloween, because they’re not really strangers anymore. If your neighborhood has a civic group, you might think about attending a meeting or two to find out about the neighborhood watch and complain about the crappy job the city is doing removing trash, or snow, or repaving your potholed streets.
Voting is one of those things that can cascade into building healthy communities, unlike “community organizing” as popularized by such as our current Chief Community Organizer, which is essentially political in nature and does little to solidify a community past enraging it against the establishment. And every time someone early-votes, or sits home, or sends in an absentee ballot, we lose a chance to engage that person in the local community.
The atrophy of local communities is most evident when residents start taking liberties with the rules. Rules like zoning laws. For instance, we have a civic league in our neighborhood, originally started to keep the black man out (which is why my parents never joined it), but in recent years it’s been revamped to handle neighborhood watch and that sort of thing. It has no power (there are no covenants or CC&Rs here) but it’s at least a place to take a gripe, I suppose; I’ve never been to a meeting on general principle. (If they’d change the name I might reconsider.) And when a resident (or possibly his tenant) a few blocks down the street started turning the property into a lawn care business, with three sheds wired for electricity and a dirt turnaround churned into the front yard with trucks parked there overnight, the civic league…
DID NOTHING.
Now, this was a major zoning violation. Granted, my dad ran a business out of our garage for years, but he didn’t make a mess of the place and his truck was just a plain old pickup truck. That other property was an eyesore and had to be making surrounding property values plummet.
So after a few months of driving past it every couple of days, I decided I’d had enough; you let one property owner get away with that kind of shite, and the next thing you know, everybody’s doing it. So I wrote an anonymous letter to the county zoning commission, outlining all of the violations I’d seen (including failure to obtain permits; you can look that up online these days). I wrote it anonymously because, yeah, I’m a coward that way, but I also didn’t want a bunch of angry Hispanic yard workers burning my house down in the middle of the night.
It took about a month, and I honestly don’t know if my letter had done any good or if the landlord had simply come by and had a fit over the property destruction, but that home-based business vanished overnight and all the damage (including to the lawn) was repaired. (The sheds are still there, but nobody seems to be using them.)*
And it made me wonder about why the civic league couldn’t have done something about it, nipped it in the bud when it was just starting up. To which I applied the assumption that, if more people actually got out and met their neighbors, maybe the civic league would have a little more punch when it came to such things.
Tocqueville said that Americans were unique in that we created voluntary associations. His point was that we tended to self-organize for the betterment of the community. It’s something we don’t seem to do well anymore; Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone suggested that we tend to do a lot more things individually that we used to do in groups (more people bowling than ever, but a decline in league participation). Is it because we don’t have time? Too many other things happening in our lives? Too much TV? Are we simply depressed as a nation because our horrible political class has made our future seem bleak?
I don’t actually know the answer to that. I can vouch for his assertion that fraternal organizations are shedding members like mad, but in fairness, as a fraternal insider who has done some research on that problem, it’s fairly simple to see why if you understand the fragile dynamics of how fraternalism became so huge to begin with. That doesn’t seem to translate, though, to the declines in other types of memberships or activities, or even into the decline in the numbers of those who arse themselves to vote.
But one of the insidious methods that has been employed to destroy communities over the years is, to me, early voting, which relieves the citizenry of the supposedly-onerous duty of actually showing up at the goddamn polls once or twice a year to exercise their franchise and mingle with their neighbors and fellow citizens.
There have been suggestions that Election Day should be a national holiday when businesses close and everyone participates in the great American experiment. I used to be against that; I didn’t believe that voting should be that easy (an attitude I picked up from my father). It should be somewhat of a sacrifice, a sacrifice upon the altar of American civic virtue. But I am less and less convinced that closing things down for a day for elections would be a bad thing.
Perhaps my soul is too old. But as I wrote that, I thought of bunting, and picnic tables, and people mingling and eating and engaging in free discourse before and after they voted at the nearby polling place. (Yeah, I know. It’s November. Maybe it could be in the church basement. I dunno.) I thought of citizens acting like citizens for a change, instead of citizens yelling at other citizens and damning them for rotten traitorous bastards because we’ve become so damnably polarized as a people.
We actually can all get along. But we have to rebuild our communities in order to do that. And part of rebuilding our communities is getting to a place where we are forced to deal with our fellow citizens.
Putting a stop to early voting is just one thing we could do to effect that.
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* Edit to add: I ran an online check a little later, and lo and behold, the property was indeed cited about a month after I sent the letter for several zoning violations. The source of the complaint was “Mayor’s Action Center”. I did look at my copy of the letter, too, and noticed that I sent it to Code Enforcement, not the Zoning Commission; my error, above. “Mayor’s Action Center” is a catchall for all inbound complaints, so my letter may very well have had an affect.